It has been three days since Women’s Month ended. Yet, it becomes even more necessary to move past celebration and confront what remains unchanged — inside institutions of power where lawmakers continue to expose how deeply misogyny and sexism persist.
In these spaces, gender equality is often performed in speeches but contradicted in behavior, where sexist remarks are still made, excused, or brushed off as normal political banter.
What unfolds in these moments is not just misconduct, but a reflection of how power itself is structured and who it continues to exclude. States that deny women full participation — politically, economically, socially — do not merely fail them; they destabilize themselves, and the consequences spill outward, from homes to institutions, from institutions to the state.
Across the world, a single pattern repeats. It may bore you, but societies that historically limited women’s rights and participation are often the same ones grappling with political fragility and economic stagnation. Gender inequality has long passed its moral cadence; it is now a belief embedded in our government, our economy, and our very idea of stability.
This is a persistent inequality that weakens the nation: a nation built in hues of tickled pink, now dashed with crimson red.
These are the tones we inherit, repeat, and too often refuse to interrogate. Systems that calcify in policy rooms, where performativity mars gender-based judgment; where gender quietly shapes whose voice is taken seriously.
In the Philippines, this plays out in ways that are easy to recognize but often ignored — women in leadership questioned more harshly, talked over in deliberations, or reduced to personal traits instead of policy positions.
Beyond politics, the same pattern persists. The public mirrors this imbalance as female figures are scrutinized for their appearance and demeanor, while their male counterparts are judged primarily by their actions and power. Even laws meant to protect women are unevenly enforced which reveals a gap between what is promised and what is practiced.
And yet, when women do lead and participate meaningfully, governance becomes more reflective of society’s actual needs. Decisions tend to account for a wider range of lived realities — social protection, education, health, and community welfare — because women’s participation expands what is considered “relevant” in policy-making.
But when their voices are limited or treated as secondary, the effects do not stay within gender alone. They weaken the entire structure a nation depends on because half of its foundation is being constrained.
Women at the Core of Society
Come to think of it, the question has never just been about whether women belong in nation-building — but whether nations can function without fully including them. And the evidence keeps pointing to the same answer: they cannot.
As of January 1 this year, only 28 out of 195 countries in the world have women serving as Heads of State and/or Government. At this pace, full gender equality in the highest political positions is still projected to take around 130 years. This number alone says something unsettling, not about women’s capability, but about how slowly power structures are willing to share space.
Globally, they hold only about 22.4% of Cabinet positions leading ministries, and just a small number of countries have reached anything close to parity. In fact, there are still states where women occupy less than 10% of parliamentary seats, and in extreme cases, none at all.
And yet, representation improves when systems are deliberately designed to include them.
Countries that implement gender quotas show measurable increases in women’s participation in both national and local governments. In other words, inclusion is not accidental — it is engineered. Where it is prioritized, women’s presence in leadership rises significantly compared to countries without such policies.
What is often overlooked is that women’s leadership does not just add to the number of those in power, it changes the outcome.
Research has shown that local councils in India, villages led by women saw significantly higher investment in drinking water infrastructure, addressing one of the most basic and essential public needs.
In Norway, studies have found a direct link between women in municipal leadership and stronger childcare systems.
These are structural improvements in how societies meet human needs. A proof that women, when placed in decision making positions, tend to expand what real governance considers urgent — health, care, education, and rights.
And perhaps, this is where the argument becomes unavoidable: that women are not simply participants in society, they are the foundation to its continuity. Because beyond politics, they already carry much of the burden that keeps societies alive.
In Gaza, for instance, women are not only surviving for themselves — they are sustaining life within it. Amid extreme deprivation, food scarcity, destroyed homes, and even lost loved ones, they continue to care for children, the elderly, and the injured.
“I cut one flatbread into pieces for my sons and daughter, when they eat, it’s as if I ate,” Maysoun, one of the representatives of the mothers in Gaza said.
Hala, another woman who miscarried while being forcibly displaced from north to south also shared her story.
“I was pregnant with twins… I miscarried one and saved the other,” she said.
Many face the added indignity of lacking access to menstrual hygiene products, a crisis that turns basic biological needs into daily struggles for dignity and survival.
And still, despite everything, women in Gaza continue to hold communities together — cooking communal meals from scarce resources, comforting neighbors, teaching children in temporary shelters, and providing care wherever formal systems have collapsed.
It is hard not to pause here and recognize what this actually reveals. Even in the most extreme conditions of state failure or war, women are often the ones absorbing the shock, carrying not only their own survival but the survival of others.
More than half of households in Gaza are now headed by women, meaning that in the absence or collapse of formal structures, they become the de facto backbone of continuity. And yet, even women-led organizations that support these communities have been heavily damaged by ongoing war.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), women account for 67% of the global health and social care workforce, forming the backbone of hospitals, clinics, and community health systems worldwide. It is further estimated that women provide essential health services for around 5 billion people globally, a scale of care that is almost difficult to fully grasp.
Yet despite this immense contribution, the financial value of women’s work in health systems is estimated at over 3 trillion USD annually — work that remains deeply undervalued and often undercompensated according to the WHO.
So when we talk about women as the foundation of nations, this is not just metaphorical. It is observable in every aspect. Women sustain economies through unpaid labor, they stabilize communities through care work. And when systems collapse, they are often the ones left holding what remains together.
And yet, despite all of this, harmful norms continue to shape how women are seen. These ideas do not stay abstract — they influence media narratives that scrutinize women more harshly, workplace dynamics, and political cultures that continue to undervalue women’s voices even when evidence shows their effectiveness.
The real question is why their role continues to be treated as supplementary when the very structure of society depends on their labor, their care, and their leadership.
A nation that understands this does not simply move closer to equality. It moves closer to reality, because it finally aligns power with who is already sustaining it. And a nation that refuses to recognize this contradiction does not remain neutral. It becomes incomplete by design, held together by the very people it continues to undervalue.
Repression is Fragility
In spaces where conflict thrives, women are pushed to the margins of survival and entirely erased from power.
This is the fracture point of failing nations: when women are silenced, conflict does not just persist — it deepens. A state that refuses to hear half its population cannot produce lasting peace.
Under Taliban rule, women have been systematically removed from public life, barred from education, restricted from work, and increasingly erased from civic participation, even in something as basic as having their voices heard in public spaces. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban has gone as far as restricting women’s voices and presence in public life, repression is not merely symbolic — it is structural.
When women are removed from education, governance, and discourse, the nation loses not just equality, but its capacity in making a better nation. Decisions become narrower, power is more concentrated, and policies are more detached from lived realities.
This same pattern mutates differently in South Sudan, where the commodification of women through bride pricing has turned cultural practice into a driver of violence. Families marry off daughters earlier to survive, cutting short education and exposing girls to abuse.
And when a woman becomes a form of currency, violence begins to attach itself to her value.
Violence begins in the household but does not stay there; it spills into communities, into armed conflict, into the state itself. What looks like isolated cultural practice becomes linked to wider instability: raids, retaliation, displacement, and death. Even the most personal institution “marriage” becomes entangled with violence at the national level.
In Juba, a 17-year-old girl — referred to here as Mary for her safety — was forced into marriage with a man more than twice her age after her family accepted cattle as dowry. When she attempted to escape after repeated abuse, her case was taken to a customary court. But instead of protection, she was ordered to return to her husband, justified under the weight of tradition.
Her case reflects a wider reality in South Sudan, where cultural practice and informal justice systems often fail to protect girls from forced marriage and violence.
Oppression does not simply harm women; it reorganizes society around inequality, normalizing domination as a way of life. And when domination becomes culture, conflict becomes inevitable.
Fragile men build fragile states, because repression is not strength, but fear dressed as power, a desperate attempt to control what they cannot understand, and to silence what they know could undo them. Violence is not an anomaly; it is a continuation of the same hierarchy imposed at home.
Across multiple studies and global peace processes, higher levels of women’s participation are consistently linked with more durable peace agreements and lower risks of conflict relapse.
When women are included in negotiations, the scope of peace expands beyond military ceasefires to include social recovery, education, healthcare, and long-term community rebuilding.
Liberia offers one of the clearest examples of this shift. During the country’s civil conflict, women organized mass movements demanding peace, staging sustained protests, and applying pressure on armed factions during negotiations in ways that ultimately contributed to breaking deadlocks in talks.
In hindsight, it revealed something important: peace processes that exclude women are not only less representative — they are often less effective.
The presence of women does not guarantee peace, but their absence almost guarantees its failure. Because a nation cannot silence its women without silencing its future. Every law that excludes them, every system that diminishes them, every culture that demands their quiet obedience does not strengthen the state — it weakens it from within.
And still, societies hesitate to act on what they already know.
Because acknowledging that women are central to peace and stability also means acknowledging that their exclusion is not accidental, but structural.
Misogyny from the Podium
Four years after the fall of Rodrigo Duterte — the country’s famously misogynistic leader — the Philippines tells you it has changed, that this is a new era, a break from the politics that made disrespect toward women seem acceptable.
Yet even as the country attempts to distance itself from that past, the same patterns persist beneath the surface.
While current President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. projects a progressive image of advancing women’s rights on the global stage, he continues to preside over a dynastic stronghold that marginalizes Filipino women at home.
Marcos Jr. is set to speak and highlight his administration’s supposed commitment in amplifying women’s voices at the opening of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s 70th session in the US. But here, within the country, the same corrupt system that underlies the very struggles women continue to endure.
And so the violence continues.
In this year alone, a single comment made during a legislative hearing by Quezon City 4th District Rep. Bong Suntay has sparked a broader national conversation on gender respect, public accountability, and the persistent objectification many Filipino women continue to face as the country marks National Women’s Month this March.
“Nakita ko si Anne Curtis, ang ganda-ganda pala niya. You know, may desire sa loob ko na, nag-init talaga, na-imagine ko na lang kung anong pwedeng mangyari. Pero syempre hanggang imagination na lang ‘yon. Pero ‘di naman siguro ako pwedeng kasuhan kung ano ang na-imagine ko eh,” Suntay said.
And you are left to ask — why is this still something we debate?
The Philippine Commission on Women (PCW) did not hesitate to call it out. On March 4, the PCW issued a strongly worded statement condemning the remark, stressing that Suntay’s words were not a “harmless comment,” but a form of sexual objectification delivered in a public forum by an elected official.
“Ang dignidad ng babae ay hindi paksa ng biro, pagnanasa, o komentaryo. Ito ay karapatang pantao na hindi dapat yurakan ng kahit sino, lalo pa ng isang mambabatas ng Kongreso,” PCW added.
But calling it out is one thing. Holding people accountable is another. When Mamamayang Liberal party-list Rep. Leila de Lima spoke up, she pointed to something deeper.
“Why is the vice president silent? Is it because staying quiet benefits her politically or personally?” de Lima said.
“Misogyny corrodes institutions and leadership. It cannot be dismissed as a joke, especially when it comes from elected officials,” she added.
And if you think this only happens here, it doesn’t.
Just this year, a survey in Scotland by Holyrood magazine revealed that female Members of the Scottish Parliament across all parties have faced rape threats, death threats, and severe misogynistic abuse.
Labour MSP Pam Duncan-Glancy shared that she had been called a “paedophile’s wet dream,” while Conservative MSP Annie Wells said she had been told she would be “set alight.”
More than three-quarters of the women who responded reported that the abuse had worsened since they were first elected. Some have even considered stepping down — not because they are incapable, but because the cost of leadership has become unbearable.
Meanwhile, as election season approaches in Zambia, politicians and women’s rights activists have raised alarm over a growing pattern: female candidates being asked for sexual favors in exchange for political endorsement.
Mainga Kabika, permanent secretary of the government’s Gender Division, confirmed that complaints involved “various political party officials, including chairpersons, youth leaders and those holding senior positions,” demanding such favors in exchange for support.
These are only some of the many cases that reflect a larger reality — one that women continue to navigate every day.
Let us never forget.
Leni Robredo has endured years of misogynistic attacks since her election as vice president in 2016. She became a primary target of disinformation campaigns, with false narratives designed to discredit her, often laced with undertones meant to question her intelligence and competence.
At the same time, Sara Duterte has been mocked for her less “feminine” demeanor, while her experience as a rape victim has been trivialized in public discourse.
Even within spaces meant to confront abuse, the problem persists.
Robin Padilla, a former actor now leading a Senate probe into sexual harassment in the media industry, posed a question to human rights lawyer Lorna Kapunan during a hearing. He asks if a husband can ask his wife for sex if he is “in the mood” and she is not.
“What if your wife does not want to? Is there no other way for husbands? If you look to other women, you might get sued,” Padilla said.
“A woman’s right to say no is fundamental and absolute, regardless of marital status,” GABRIELA Secretary-General Clarice Palce said.
Padilla’s “audacity to question a woman’s right to her own body is a glaring example of the deeply rooted machismo that continues to plague our society,” she added.
When a legislator introduces this kind of framing inside a formal inquiry, it exposes how deeply entrenched ideas about women’s bodies can enter policy discourse itself. And this is disturbing because even in spaces designed to challenge abuse, the very definition of abuse is still being debated from a place of misunderstanding or normalization.
So ask yourself — how many times have you heard something like this and let it pass? Because these are not just random moments. They are part of a pattern: the normalization of misogyny in public language, especially when it comes from people in power. A sexist remark from a lawmaker, a rape threat dismissed as “online noise,” a candidate pressured into sexual favors, a woman leader mocked for her tone, her body, her trauma, and her voice interrupted even in the spaces where she is supposed to be represented.
When misogyny is ignored in everyday language, it grows. When it is excused, it spreads. And when it spreads, it becomes part of the system itself.
This is how systems rot from within, through repetition. What leaders normalize becomes what institutions permit, and what institutions permit becomes what nations endure.
And this is where the connection becomes unavoidable. Nations do not fail women in a single moment, they fail them through accumulated tolerance. Over time, these patterns stop being exceptions and start becoming culture.
Even with 95 women in a Congress with 342 members, representation does not guarantee pro-women governance. Women legislators and high-ranking officials, including Vice President Sara Duterte, who remains silent despite repeated misogynistic remarks from fellow officials — proof that the rot of impunity thrives where accountability falters.
And yet, the most dangerous lessons are learned not in whispers, but from the podium itself.
How the System Fails to Protect Women
Protection is not tested when it is promised. It is tested at the exact moment it is needed, when a woman decides to speak, to report, to seek help from the very institutions that claim to safeguard her. And too often, that is where the system begins to falter.
From late August to late November in 2025, the Philippine National Police documented close to 7,000 cases of violence against women and children. Thousands in just a matter of months. A year earlier, in 2023, more than 13,000 cases were already documented that includes rape, harassment, and abuse. The numbers change, but the pattern does not.
And behind every number is a moment where someone was supposed to be safe and wasn’t.
Recent report by the WHO reported that more than 7% of Filipino women aged 15 to 49 have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. Other surveys suggest even higher exposure to physical harm and sustained abuse.
These are not just statistics, they are lived violations that often happen behind closed doors, inside relationships, inside homes that were supposed to mean safety. They map out a system that is repeatedly being tested and repeatedly falling short.
But perhaps the most damning figure is not just how many experience violence — it is also how many never speak about it. Only one in three women who experience violence ever report it or seek help.
Because silence is not absence, it is a response. It is what happens when systems are seen as slow, when victims expect disbelief, when justice feels conditional. It is what remains when protection exists in law but not when they need it the most.
In Marawi, a 13 year old named Samira was sexually abused. By fourteen, she had already given birth. But what cuts deeper than the violence itself is the confusion that followed it because she did not even understand what was happening to her body.
Aisha, the social welfare officer who handled her case, remembers their first meeting not as a legal procedure, but as a child trying to make sense of something no child should ever endure. “She kept asking me,” Aisha recalled, “Why is my stomach getting bigger? Am I sick? What is happening to me?”
There is something devastatingly quiet about that question. Not rage. Not accusation. Just confusion. A body changing without consent, a child carrying the consequences of violence she could not even name.
Samira was one of only nine children who came forward in her area that year. Nine. In a place where many more cases are believed to exist but remain buried in silence.
“There are people who still say, ‘It’s the girl’s fault,’” Aisha said. “That kind of judgment stops other victims from coming forward,” she added.
That is how violence sustains itself not only through force, but through culture. Through blame disguised as morality. Through communities that question victims before perpetrators. Through a society that quietly teaches girls that protection must be earned, not guaranteed. Because when blame is redirected toward the victims, the burden of justice shifts away from institutions and back onto individuals.
And so many never come forward at all. But even for those who do, survival does not guarantee safety.
Recent reports across the country paint a disturbing continuity: women killed by live-in partners, wives stabbed by husbands, minors abused by stepfathers, teenagers assaulted by people inside their own homes. Schools are not spared either, with cases involving educators under investigation for abuse. Even institutions of authority are implicated, with law enforcement officers themselves facing accusations of rape.
These are repetitions of the same failure across different spaces. Their own homes become unsafe and the very system meant to enforce safety becomes unsafe.
The rise of AI-generated deepfake content has added a new layer of violence, one that does not require physical presence, only access. Women and children can now be targeted, manipulated, and violated through images that are fabricated but still deeply damaging.
Women’s rights group GABRIELA have called this what it is: not a trend, not a collection of cases, but an “epidemic.” Because epidemics do not just spread — they overwhelm systems that are not built to contain them.
As advocates have pointed out, these incidents are the outcome of a structure that has repeatedly failed to value women and children as priorities. A structure where harm is normalized, where accountability is delayed, and where protection often arrives too late — if it arrives at all.
These acts persist because the system itself allows them to persist. “These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum. They are the result of a rotten system that devalues women and children, normalizes misogyny, and allows impunity to flourish — while people’s money that could have been spent to protect and provide services for women gets lost to corruption,” Palce said.
“From brutality in the home to high-tech exploitation online, and even within the halls of learning, violence against women and children persists because the state lacks the political will to uproot its causes and deliver immediate justice — if not acting as the perpetrator itself,” Palce added.
It is a statement that is difficult to ignore because it does not exaggerate — it exposes. And when exposure becomes too uncomfortable, systems often respond with distance: with procedures, with delays, with silence disguised as process.
Over time, this does not just affect individual cases. It reshapes how people see the state itself. What emerges from all of this is not a collection of separate stories, but a single, continuous pattern: systemic neglect.
A nation does not collapse all at once, it erodes each time it teaches its women that they are less. Because a country that diminishes its women does not merely wound half its people — it hollows out its own foundation, until what remains is not a nation at all, but the residue of their actions.
Nations that fail women fail as nations. A state cannot claim legitimacy while consistently failing to protect half of its population. Real change demands more than acknowledgment, it demands refusal to accept this pattern as normal. It demands systems that respond swiftly, institutions that treat women’s safety as non-negotiable, and accountability that does not bend to delay or power.
And if a nation continues to fail its women, then it is not just women they fail — it is the nation itself that is failing to stand as one.
